The Endless Quest
‘By what, Maitreyi, can one know the knower?’ — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
I must have been 8, perhaps 9, when it happened for the first time. I was walking somewhere, the sun belting down on my scalp, when I was first struck by the absolute inexplicability of existence.
I remember pausing in my step to regain balance, trying to understand what was happening inside me — the increased thumping of my heart, the rush of blood to my head, the hair standing on end. And the indescribable feeling — the awe, the bafflement, the sheer thrill — that accompanied the realization that the ground beneath one’s feet has fallen away permanently, that there isn’t — there never was — anything solid to hold on to, that there are no ultimate answers.
The realization that if one takes any question — the most seemingly mundane ones — and starts probing deeper, one rapidly reaches the limits of is known. Pause. This might seem like an obvious statement — for I was a child, with limited understanding of the world; there were principles of physics, say, that I did not know then, and — given the inexhaustibly vast library of the physical sciences — that I would never know even as an adult. But what I experienced at that point went much beyond that. At that moment I was flooded with the realization that if one takes anything and starts questioning, we hit the horizon of what anyone can ever possibly know. The world, our existence, my existence, was fundamentally — and awe-inspiringly — mysterious. There I was, standing under the sun, with my parents near me, with someone speaking something to me that I was not paying attention to, with the noises of the street…. what is all this? How is any of this possible? It is impossible that this moment should exist, and yet is seems to be. That was my first attack.
There have been many attacks since, many blissful moments where the absurdity of the world manifests itself in a flash. And the belief (belief, for it is not grounded in logic) that the ultimate questions are unanswerable — not just now and not just by us, but by anyone, anytime — remains as strong today as it was to that 8-year-old. Since then I have been thinking of these questions, around these questions, sometimes torturing myself over them. Not to find answers (for there are none), but simply because the questions were so burning. So, for me, dwelling on these fundamental questions is not something driven merely by intellectual curiosity; it is instead propelled by a very real, primal, existential urge. I do not have a choice but to torture myself over these questions.
Until quite recently though (I am now 34), I had not embarked on a systematic study of the great philosophers and their schools of metaphysical thought. I have always wanted to steep myself in these philosophical texts, and in fact considered majoring in philosophy when I was at the crossroads in class twelve; why I instead chose the ‘safer’ choice of computer science is a story for another time (hint: adolescence, anxiety, crippling lack of confidence). I dabbled in this and that: some Russell, some Plato, the existentialists (Sartre in particular); with Nagel I wondered what it might be like to be a bat, with Hofstadter I tied myself up in strange loops. But I was not able to get a good handle on the major philosophical threads, I did not have a larger framework to bring to my explorations in philosophy, an overarching structure to serve as my compass while traveling with one individual philosopher — to help me find my way back home, to help me assimilate all I was reading into a larger story, to help me see how the ideas of the philosopher I was currently reading fit in with others’ across centuries and continents. Until I found this framework, each philosophical work I read — while being stimulating, engaging, thought provoking — left me somewhat muddled, incomplete, and unsatisfied. The histories of philosophy that I read in bits and parts, Durant’s and Russell’s, which purportedly are exactly such frameworks for grappling with philosophy, left me even more disoriented — they were series of fascinating stories, but what the superstructure? And then, 2 years back, I came across Bryan Magee.
In Magee’s fantastic, illuminating, and crystal-clear books & interviews on major western thinkers and their philosophies, I found my compass. Here was someone who needed to know, whose passion for the philosophical quest leapt off the page and grabbed you. Magee has led me to the primary texts of Descartes, Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, Popper, and others. It is a journey that has just begun. How I wish I had read him as a teenager at that high-school crossroads.
In parallel with my discovery of Magee was the serendipitous encounter, in a packed second-hand bookstore aisle (Blossoms Bangalore, if you want to know), of S. Radhakrishnan’s 2-volume Indian Philosophy. Until then I had regarded philosophy from a purely western lens, and had (for multiple reasons that might be interesting to dwell on separately) relegated Indian thought to the — in my mind at least — lower pedestal of theology. How wrong I was. Radhakrishnan’s quite dense but readable books were a tight awakening slap. The vast, deep, sophisticated waters of the Indian schools of philosophy — with the Upanishads as the glorious bedrock — beckoned, and I leapt in with joy.
It was part-way through volume 2 of SR’s Indian Philosophy that I felt a spark of recognition, that satisfactory mental click of pieces falling into place, that sense that here was a philosopher I could really get, and a philosophy after my own heart: a section that I went back and re-read hungrily — the section on Shankara and the philosophy of Advaita.
I have since been, slowly but surely, getting deeper into the Advaitic literature — the primary texts as well as the secondary commentaries. What a thrilling and challenging quest it is. And Advaita Vedanta cannot be fully understood without deeply comprehending the various other Vendantic schools, which in turn are linked to various other Indian ‘non-orthodox’ schools of thought. And of course, Indian philosophy sits within the broader themes of thought that have illuminated thinkers around the world — from the west, from China, from Africa… so to truly grasp Advaita (or any school of philosophy), one has to know the entire world. That, in short, is my plan for the next few decades…
This essay, then, is just an attempt at me putting down in writing my understanding of the core tenets of Advaita Vedanta. This is from a novice in Indian philosophy, and someone who relies on translations of — and commentaries on — the original texts. So, this is in no way meant to be an authoritative take on Advaita (or anything else) and is probably riddled with errors that I will spot a few months from now. To put it simply, I found that putting pen to paper helped synthesize the various ideas and threads running around in my head after reading my first few books on Advaita philosophy; and I am making these jottings public in case — just in case — it might light a spark in one of you to pick up one of the books by the philosophical masters and start on the journey for yourself.
This, then, will be a running series of essays; or actually it will be one essay spread out over time, with additions (and clarifications, restatements) as I read, think, and understand more about different schools of philosophy — Indian and otherwise. In short: a running journal of my incipient explorations in philosophy.
Let us begin with the most fundamental of all questions — what is this that I call ‘I’? Do I as a subject exist? While it might seem obvious to you that you as a conscious entity exist, consciousness and the Self have been — and continue to be — a topic of intense philosophical debates. The sceptic, who questions whether we can be certain of the reality of anything we perceive, extends this line of questioning to wonder whether we can be certain of the existence of our own selves. The materialist, on the other hand, says that thinking and feeling are ultimately the product of the interplay of fundamental physical constituents of the brain, which itself is a product of natural selection, with consciousness and the Self explained away as an illusion that emerges from merely physical processes. Any further talk of the Self, or ‘soul’, or consciousness, the hard materialist says, is not warranted. But one need not be a disputer of science to see the ultimate metaphysical shallowness of this purely physical argument.
Neurobiology is making rapid and remarkable strides in explaining how the human brain functions, but to claim that this does away with the Self seems, to me, to be a position lacking in philosophical insight. As S. Radhakrishnan writes in the introduction to his book The Principal Upanishads, ‘science is the knowledge of secondary causes, of the created details; wisdom is the knowledge of primary causes, of the Uncreated Principle.’ While we might never arrive at knowledge of the primary causes, while these might remain ‘eternal riddles of the world’ as Max Muller put it, we are driven forward by the urge to keep wondering, to keep seeking. Scientific theories of creation might explain the physical universe that we find ourselves in with remarkable detail, but they do not explain why there should be a universe to explain in the first place. Any amount of progress in the physical sciences will not take away the ultimate questions of existence. Questions of these sort (ones that we asked as children) — what existed before the beginning, how can something come into being from nothing, what is nothing — might be deemed ‘out of bounds’ for rational scientific inquiry, since there is no way to handle these topics empirically. They are pointless questions from a scientific perspective since they do not offer any room for ‘checking’ and testing hypotheses. But that does not stop the mind from asking them, and asking them insistently, with pressing urgency. Metaphysics might be a futile exercise, an infinite journey, but we cannot choose but to embark on it. Such is the human condition. So now, onto examining the Self.
Even when I say, ‘I am not thinking’, it is I who is thinking this thought; and in this thought itself, the existence of ‘I’ is presupposed. Or look at it this way — the only way for me to say, ‘I don’t exist’, is if ‘I’ exist; else there would not be an ‘I’ to doubt my existence. Good point at which to bring in the father of modern (Western) philosophy, Rene Descartes.
In his book Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes proposes the following thought experiment: imagine that there is a demon who is doing everything possible to delude me about the nature of reality. All my sense perceptions might be fake signals pushed in by this demon; there might not really be a chair that I am now sitting on, the demon might be creating a fake world, pumping in the sensation of weight as I sit on the chair, the chill of my leg against the wood. It is even possible that my thoughts and emotions are manufactured by the demon (which make thoughts and emotions ‘objects’ of the subjective mind, but more on this later). Yes, it is indeed possible to imagine something like this (filmmakers in Hollywood of course have played around with this concept). But, one thing that the demon cannot fake is that it is ‘me’ that is being misled, that there is a subject who is being deceived, that there is an observer who is being shrouded by a make-believe world. The objects I perceive might all be illusory, but I am the one being deluded; the subject being misled exists. Summed up in one of the famous mahakavyas of Western philosophy, cogito ergo sum (I think, and so I exist). The ‘think’ here is not just denoting intellectual introspection and the likes — it is broader to mean any conscious experience. If I am experiencing anything, I must necessarily exist.
Thus he set himself to answer the question ‘is there anything that cannot be doubted?’ by deploying what is now called the method of Cartesian Doubt — by discarding anything that might be open to the slightest doubt, anything that might be the malevolent doings of the demon, he found that he is left with only one thing of which he is certain — and that is that he himself exists. This was the single foundation brick on which Descartes erected his entire philosophical structure. It was the foundation brick of modern Western philosophy. He writes:
“I who seem to possess so distinct an apprehension of the piece of wax, do I not know myself, both with greater truth and certitude, and also much more distinctly and clearly? For if I judge that the wax exists because I see it, it assuredly follows, much more evidently, that I myself am or exist, for the same reason: for it is possible that what I see may not in truth be wax, and that I do not even possess eyes with which to see anything; but it cannot be that when I see, or which comes to the same thing, when I think I see, I myself who think am nothing.” (emphasis mine)
900 years or so earlier, Shankara — the great Indian philosopher of whom we will be talking a lot more about in this essay — had put it much more succinctly (in his Brahma Sutra Bhasya): “To refute the Self is impossible, for he who tries to refute it is the Self.” Or as Vidyaranya, a post-Shankara philosopher in the Advaita school, put it in the Panchadasi: “‘No one can doubt the fact of his own existence. Were one to do so, who could the doubter be? Only a deluded man could entertain the idea that he does not exist.”
The 20th century writer on Advaita philosophy, TMP Mahadevan, in The Philosophy of Advaita: “Self-existence is the basic fact on which all knowledge and logic are grounded. Self-knowledge is inseparable from self-existence. Shankara says that self-knowledge which is neither logical nor sensory is the presupposition of every other kind of cognition. It is beyond proof, since it is the basis of all proof.” (emphasis mine)
So yes, I as a subject exist. At his point let us call this the jivatma, the individual soul (if you are uncomfortable using the world ‘soul’, use something else instead). Let us now dig deeper.
Can there be multiple ‘I’s? Can multiple independent jivatmas exist — you, me, and everyone else in the world? Seems obvious that they do independently exist but let us put this under the advaita scanner. Let us go deeper into the essence of this subject ‘I’.
‘I’ is the Observer — the nirguna i.e. property-less observer (we will get to nirguna and saguna in a bit). ‘I’ is that which watches everything — not just everything in the external world (‘external’ objects), but everything in the mind too (‘internal’ objects). Let us dwell on this before we proceed any further. Aren’t thoughts and emotions components of ‘I’, aren’t they part of what makes the subject? Aren’t they what, put together, constitute the ‘mind’? Isn’t my mind the same as ‘I’?
Isn’t my mind the same as ‘I’. There are different ways of looking at the mind vis-à-vis the subjective ‘I’. From my understanding, the terms ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ are used interchangeably in Western philosophy. In Vedanta though, there is a distinction. You say you are angry, sad, happy; but is the anger, the sadness, the happiness the same as you (i.e. ‘I’)? The Vedantic view — per my understanding — is that when I say I am angry, there is an ‘I’ that is conscious of the feeling of anger. Oftentimes, in the spur of emotion, we might not be able to understand this distinction; but when, with a bit of distance, I examine the emotion, I realize that it is something I observe; there is an observer, the ‘I’, the subject, that watches the emotion rise up; the emotion, and the apparent engagement between the emotion and the subject (i.e. the feeling that ‘I am getting angry’) are both objects that the subject is watching.
Another way of thinking about this is that for an emotion to have a subjective experience, there has to be a subject on which the emotion is acting (taking up from the previous paragraph, this can be rephrased as ‘there has to be a subject that is observing the emotion’). Because if this were not so, then how can the emotion register in the first place? On ‘what’ does it register? There must be an underlying substratum on which emotions can play out, a substratum with reference to which anything ‘external’ (this chair, that book) or ‘internal’ (i.e. mind states) can be grasped. That substratum is the ‘I’.
Now here is another extension to that line of thought. The very same Observer is the substratum to emotions of happiness at one time, sadness at another, and anger at yet another time. Happiness, sadness, anger are not integral components of the ‘I’, but various external elements that gain prominence in the subject’s ‘field of vision’ at different times. Similarly, nothing external (sense perception), and no mind-state, can be considered an integral part of ‘I’ — the subject is the blank slate that observes everything else. It has no ‘properties’ — all properties are external to it.
A minor tangential note: it is a fact that, even to explain Advaita — or complete uncompromising non-dualism, one has no choice but to rely on dualistic language; one cannot explain Advaita in monistic language. One uses the dualistic tools as the scaffolding that helps to construct the Advaitic edifice; once the building is up, once knocks away the scaffolding.
If all properties are external to it, does ‘I’ even exist? Yes, it does, is the Advaitic answer, because I am aware of these other properties, I am aware of myself having these properties play out on my subjective consciousness. This awareness, this consciousness, is what defines the ‘I’. Consciousness could then be considered a ‘property’ of the subject, but that is perhaps because of a paucity in the common vocabulary — the correct Advaitic stance is that true subject is completely property-less (nirguna), with even self-consciousness being in the realm of avidya and maya; to have knowledge of the self (or anything else) implies a subject-object distinction which is ruled out by Advaita. But let us request maya and avidya to wait in the lobby momentarily; we are not ready to admit them in yet.
Another point to spend a moment on — it is the same ‘I’ that persists through all the phases of anger, happiness, sadness. Only then will I be conscious that all of this is happening to me. Similarly, it is the same ‘I’ that exists when I was a child, and now, as an adult. It is the same ‘I’ that persists across states of sleep and wakefulness; I might not recall anything from my dreamless sleep, but it is the same me that existed prior to me sleeping, through my sleep, and after I wake up; ‘I’ is the common substratum of my existence, the ground of my being.
To quote TPM Mahadevan again from The Philosophy of Advaita, “But for a basic consciousness which strings together all the particular cognitions the differences of the latter would not be apprehended. Even to say that there is a series of cognitions there must be a permanent consciousness which persists in and through all the particular cognitions. Movement is inconceivable without a reference to a thing which does not move. The concept of momentariness is unintelligible without a reference to a principle which is immutable and eternal.” (emphasis mine). This immutable and eternal principle is Atman.
So we have now identified that the subject is property-less, that the subject is the substratum on which all other mental events take place, that the subject is characterized by pure consciousness or pure awareness, and that the subject remains unchanged through time. This subject is what Vedanta calls Atman. With these concepts in place, we are now at a good position from which to answer the question we asked — can multiple jivatmas exist independently? Let me slightly rephrase this in light of the line of reasoning we have taken so far — can multiple Atmans exist independent of each other?
Think about it — if the subject (i.e. Atman) is property-less, if it is pure-consciousness, how can it be contained within any ‘body’? Doing so would be limiting it, which contradicts the pure-conscious-substratum identity of the subject. Any limiting factor is contradictory to the nature of Atman because a limit implies that it can be this but not that, i.e. that it can have this property but not that property. By our line of argument so far, we can see that the subject stands outside of the realm of properties; placing any limit on it, this, would be placing certain properties on it, which is contradictory.
Thus, the pure subject cannot be circumscribed in any way. It is pure substratum. Which means that the concept of separate jivatmas is contradictory; there is only one Atman that is the common substratum to all ‘external’ objects, the observer that watches everything. There are no jivatmas in the plural, there is only the singular Atman.
If Atman is the pure, undifferentiated subject ‘within’ us, Brahman in Vedanta denotes the cosmic subject, the ground of all existence, the universal observer. By following the Advaitic line of reasoning we just concluded that there is only a singular Atman — without any properties, with no internal distinctions, and changeless. Thus there is no difference between Atman and Brahman, there cannot be any difference; Atman is non-different from Brahman. The Subject that sits ‘inside’ me IS the Universal Subject. Tat tvam asi — ‘That’ IS Me. All differences collapse, everything is one. The only thing real is the pure, undifferentiated, property-less observer. Call it Atman, call it Brahman.
I had gooseflesh when this core tenet of Advaita first registered with me. One starts by looking closer into their own self, only to find that it is identical to the entirety of existence.
If Atman and Brahman are non-different, if they are essentially just interchangeable terms, then why, you might ask, introduce the two as separate concepts in the first place? Why not just say everything is Atman (or Brahman) and be done with it? The answer I think is a very human one, to drive home the realization of non-duality. To start from our own selves — something that we know intimately, and the only thing that we can really know without a doubt — and to then make the leap that merges our Self with the cosmos is a thrilling perspective shift. Eliot Deutsh — a brilliant, lucid expositor of Advaita — puts it wonderfully in his book Advaita Vedanta — A Philosophical Reconstruction: “Identity judgments such as those expressed in the mahavakya (great saying) tat tvam asi “thou art that” are not, for the Advaitin, mere tautologies: they are the concrete representation of a movement of thought from one ontological level (of particularity) through another (of universality) to yet another (of unity), wherein the attainment of the latter negates the distinctions between the former. One begins with individual consciousness (tvam), passes on to universal consciousness (tat), and arrives at the pure consciousness that overcomes the separative reality of both the individual and the universal and that constitutes their ground.” (emphasis mine)
From particularity, to universality, to unity. The ground of my being is also the universal ground of all being.
Deutsch again: “The Self is One, it is not different from Brahman. This is the central meta-religious or meta-psychological affirmation of Advaita Vedanta. It means that man is essentially spiritual; that in the most profound dimension of his being he is no longer the “individual” that he ordinarily takes himself to be, but that he is precisely Reality itself. The affirmation is based not on mere speculation, but upon experience supported by a phenomenological analysis of what we erroneously take to be our selves. For Advaita, to affirm oneself as Reality is an act of a free man. The knowledge of non-difference leads to freedom, to the realization of the potentialities of our human being.”
Let us do a checkpoint here. We melted away the difference between individual subjects and merged them into one universal Subject. But what about objects? I seemed to have just assumed that we can subsume those into the non-dual reality of Atman/Brahman, but I did not construct the line of reasoning for that — I haven’t quite made it clear why objects must be done away with. Is it not possible that reality might be dualistic in nature, with the one Subject observing one or many external object(s)? This is after all the mind-matter duality that Descartes arrived at, and it is also the conclusion of other schools of Indian philosophy like Sankhya. What might be the Advaitic response to this?
Gaudapada, a preceptor of Shankara, used the experience we have while dreaming to respond with this question. While we are dreaming, all our sense perceptions seem very real (i.e. very much like how we perceive objects when we are awake), but then we wake up to ‘reality’, we realize the illusory nature of the dream objects. The material objects that we perceived while dreaming, the emotions we felt, all seem real; in some dreams we know that we are dreaming, but more often we do not. Such dreams are internally consistent, with nothing out of place, nothing that raises any suspicions that we might be dreaming. Yet, we wake up from such dreams to realize that they were just very convincing illusions (like spells cast by that Cartesian demon). This being the case, what is to say that the objects we perceive in our waking consciousness are not illusory? What gives us the confidence that this state is real, that these objects are more real than the ones we encountered in our dreams? Might we not wake up from this dream too?
This is not to conclusively say that objects are not real. But it certainly muddies up the waters somewhat; it gently questions our conviction about the reality of the objects that we are seeing, feeling, smelling at this moment. Now let us park that line of thought for a while and bring in Kant.
Immanuel Kant brought, in the Western philosophical context, a radically new way of looking at the world. Simply put, he placed forth the (on reflection, startlingly obvious) point that we can only ever perceive or ‘know’ what it is possible for us to perceive or know, based on our apparatus for perceiving and understanding. If this seems rather tautological, let us look at it this way: say I am a bat (channeling Nagel) — sight-less, navigating with sound. I will then never know what it is like to ‘see’ in the way that humans do. The world to me is a very different place to what it might be like for a human. This chair I am now sitting on is a fundamentally different concept for a bat. Now, who is to say what the ‘correct’ representation of the chair is — the chair as perceived by the bat, and as perceived by me? They are different, but both valid. The phenomenal aspects of the chair (i.e. the way it presents itself to the observer’s consciousness) are quite different for the bat and the human, but the reality behind the phenomenal curtain — what Kant called things-in-themselves or the noumenon — are the same. In other words, our world — our perceptions, our knowledge — is a joint creation of our modes of perception and the things-in-themselves. We build our worlds. Kant is not saying that the world is conjured up by the observer (he was not an idealist); but Kant certainly rules out the materialistic position which puts forth that there really is a chair out there with such and such material properties. The chair you see is a child of the marriage between your subjectivity and the ‘real’ object (the noumenon). I have no way of knowing what the real chair is like — I have no option but to make do with the ‘chair’ that I see now.
What Kant is saying is not merely about the limitations of our sense organs. If it were so, one could respond that we have already transcended our sensory limitations, with, say ultrasound, X-Rays, and so on; if Kant’s horizon of knowledge is sense-related alone, we are continuously winning more territory back from the dark unknown with each new extra-sensory tool we invent. But no. Our modes of apprehending the world, our pre-dispositions, our frames of reference generate (and hence limit) the reality we create for ourselves as well. Thus what we bring to the table, our modes of perception and comprehension that filter reality for us, are not just our auditory and visual apparatus and such, but even more fundamental frames of reference such as space, time, and causality. Space, time, and causality are subjective frames of reference that we bring with us a-priori to any observation. There isn’t a neutral ‘foundational’ field called time that exists apart from all subjects, a shared sea of time that all conscious subjects swim through; instead, we create our experience of time, or rather we bring our time frame-of-reference to the real world (i.e. the noumenon) and filter the noumenon through this; so this world of ours that seems be structured by time, this is our creation (though the world itself is not our creation — we can never comprehend what the world really is outside of our a-priori filters).
The noumenon sits outside of our concepts such as space, time, and causality. Kant, though, assumed that there are multiple noumenon — that every object that we perceive had its noumenon equivalent, the ‘real’ object, the thing-in-itself. Arthur Schopenhauer picked up from where Kant left off and asked how any talk of noumenon in the plural makes sense. If space and time do not apply to things-in-themselves, then the concept of multiplicity collapses. If two objects are separated neither in space nor in time, they are the same object. Taking Kant’s idea to its logical conclusion, Schopenhauer reasoned that reality beyond the phenomenal world is singular; or to be precise, that reality is non-dual (since the concept ‘singular’ presupposes multiplicity). There are no things-in-themselves; the only reality is the non-dual noumenon, the thing-in-itself. Which brings us remarkably close to the idea of fundamental reality — unknowable, property-less, changeless, non-dual — of Advaita.
Schopenhauer apparently discovered the Upanishads after he had written most of his major work — the pinnacle being the magnum opus The World as Will and Representation. He must have immediately felt a click of recognition (Bryan Magee’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer is an excellent companion-read to The World as Will and Representation). In his last years Schopenhauer followed a fixed daily routine, ending with a few verses from the Upanishads before sleep. “The Upanishads have been the solace of my life,” Schopenhauer wrote, “they shall be my solace in death”.
Thus, Kant and Schopenhauer calmly — and irrevocably — drew an epistemological border around us, a line that can never (ever) be breached. We can never know the noumenon, we can only observe and know phenomenon. Centuries earlier, Shankara had reached broadly the same juncture in his epistemological inquiry, but here’s the difference — Shankara said we can ‘know’ the noumenon (Brahman/Atman) — not by intellectual apprehension (which is impossible as we just laid out; and not knowledge in the ordinary sense since that would presuppose duality), but by direct experience, by becoming one with it. Or rather, by realizing, in a flash of experiential insight, that we already are one with it. More on this later in the essay.
So where does that leave us? Those ‘objects’ that seemed so secure and solid just a while back seem now to be on shaky ground. But let us approach this question from yet another angle. We concluded a little earlier that Atman/Brahman cannot be limited in any way. The proposition of the existence of an object that is fundamentally distinct from the subject implies that there are limits on the subject — if the domain of the subject cannot encompass the object, then the two are by essence separated. As any limits are contradictory to Atman, the proposition put forth — i.e. that objects exist — cannot be true.
This same argument (on limits to Atman/Brahman) can also be stated thus: the independent existence of objects means that there are certain object-properties that a subject cannot possess — certain properties are ‘out of bounds’ to the subject. This in turn would imply that Atman does have properties — else, a lack of certain properties would be a meaningless statement. But we have already seen that Atman does not have any properties. Hence the proposition of the existence of objects cannot be true.
If objects do not exist, if there is only the singular, undifferentiated, property-less, pure-conscious observer, then how can we account for all the apparent duality we find in our world? If only Atman is real, what is this perception I have of the laptop I am typing this on? This is certainly one of the more challenging questions in Advaita, with a few somewhat varying answers put forth by thinkers. More on this in just a bit.
Shankara put forth another, quite interesting, approach to reasoning for the reality of the undifferentiated nirguna Brahman. We (think we) see a snake at first, and recoil in fear, only to later realize that it was in fact merely a rope. Our earlier experience (call this ‘X’) of the snake has been invalidated, nullified, and replaced by our later experience (and realization) that it was in fact a rope (‘Y’). In other words, X has been ‘subrated’ by Y [ref. Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta — A Philosophical Reconstruction]; the snake-object was not real, as it was subsequently subrated. Carrying this one step further, how can we be certain that the rope-object will not later be subrated as well? We might realize that it is not a rope but a golf-club (or perhaps we realize that it was indeed a snake), which would subrate the rope-object. One cannot be certain that the rope-object is un-subrate-able (forgive me for using this abominable-looking term). What applies to the rope-object applies to all objects — one cannot be certain that any object is un-subrate-able, that is, one cannot be certain that the experience we have of any object is completely free from the possibility of being nullified and replaced by a ‘truer’ experience at a later time.
As summed up by Eliot Deutsch: ‘All contents of sense-mental experience, of experience wherein a fundamental distinction exists between subject and object, are susceptible to this stripping away of values previously imposed upon them because of their incompatibility with other forms of experience, and to this turning away from them as objects no longer worthy of one’s consideration. As human experience testifies, any judgment within Appearance, any experience, or belief or idea that is subject to a mental perspective to external conditions which is bound up with temporal determinations can, in principle, be falsified by future experience. Any experience of the self who has not attained Reality is subject to being rejected by a qualitatively higher experience.’ (emphasis mine)
According to Shankara, something can be deemed real only if there is no chance of it being subrated. As we have seen just now, the only way we can achieve reality per this yardstick is to completely transcend subject-object distinctions. All objects are subrateable, hence unreal; anything within the realm of our dualist world of experience is unreal. The only reality is the pure, undifferentiated Brahman. Only that cannot be rejected and replaced by a qualitatively higher experience.
You might reasonably ask whether stripping Brahman off all qualities will leave us with nothing. What prevents us from collapsing into complete nihilism, shunyata, where nothing exists, where nothing is real? To this Shankara says — the concept of nothing only makes sense in relation to something, ‘nothing’ is the negation of something else; without something to be in response to, without an underlying substratum, the concept of nothingness collapses under its own contradictions. Like we said earlier, even to say ‘I don’t exist’ presupposes an underlying substratum of subjective consciousness; on similar lines, even the concept of nothingness requires a sub-stratum in order to not crumble into meaninglessness. For what is nothing? Or as TPM Mahadevan put it, “even for nullity there must be a witness.”
We characterized Brahman as eternal and changeless. What is the Advaita Vedantic position on creation and change? Simply put, creation (of anything) is impossible, is meaningless. Why? Think about the limits-argument again. If something comes into existence, it did not exist prior to creation, and does exist now. Thus, Atman/Brahman did not contain the created element prior to the moment of creation. This would limit Atman, which contradicts Atman’s essence. Hence creation is meaningless. Taking this same line of reasoning further, any sort of change whatsoever is meaningless. A change would mean a change in certain properties — that there was a shift from state X (with X-properties) to state Y (with Y-properties). But this formulation of state X itself is contradictory to the essence of Atman — describing X in this way suggests that these X-properties exist within X and not uniformly across Atman (else the identity of X itself disappears), but this would then mean that there are limits to Atman (i.e. certain aspects of X are out of bounds to Atman). Thus, the very formulation of states X and Y, and a movement from one to another, crumbles under its contradictions. Nothing can be created, nothing can change.
Creation or change as concepts also quickly lose their grounding when you ask (and pursue to its logical conclusion) the question — what caused the creation or change? Something must have caused it. Let that something be X. So then what caused X? You realize very quickly that you are headed down an infinite regress. Theists put a full stop to the sequence by placing a godhead as the original cause. But the Advaitin (or any thinking child for that matter) will ask what caused this original cause. There is no way out of the freefall that accompanies the idea of creation or change. When it comes to ultimate reality, change and creation are untenable.
We finally arrive at the most confounding of all questions. We might have established that reality is changeless and non-dual, but we find ourselves in a world filled with change and duality. What is this phenomenal world we find ourselves in, this world of color and emotion, of creation and destruction? How does this square with the supposedly unblemished nirguna Reality? If reality is non-dual, why do we find ourselves in a seemingly dualistic world? The short — and remarkably humble — answer by Advaitic philosophers such as Shankara is ‘we don’t know’. But they did speculate deeply, of course, on the inexplicable existence of the world, and of the relationship between this phenomenal world and Reality/Brahman. And they presented some proposals for our consideration. What were some of these?
The easier way for me to answer would be to simply point you to the third chapter (‘Brahman and the World’) of Eliot Deutsch’s ‘Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction’. One of those books where I stopped underlining interesting lines part-way through, on realizing that I was hardly leaving any lines un-highlighted. Let me attempt at compressing some of the points from that chapter very briefly. So again — given that reality is Brahman and nothing else, what is this world we seem to find ourselves in, full of apparent multiplicity, creation, change?
Before we proceed, we need to bring in a few additional concepts to the mix. Firstly, regarding the 3 ontic grades of reality. We have already established the fundamental Advaitic concept of reality, — i.e. the only reality, sat, is the nirguna Brahman. On the other extreme is unreality, asat, which is defined as any concept that is contradictory, that cannot exist even in principle, for example a square circle.
Where does that leave Shankara’s snake from earlier in our essay? Or to be more precise the appearance of the snake, the experiential object of the snake that was later nullified and replaced by the experiential object of the rope? The snake is not real (for only Brahman is real), but neither is it unreal (since it is not contradictory, instead the snake-attributes were drawn from memory and mistakenly superimposed on the rope). The snake is neither real nor wholly unreal.
Now zoom out to the entire world around us. This apparently dualistic world. This falls in the same category as the snake, doesn’t it? The world seems to be internally consistent, with apparent causality and predictability and so on. It is not unreal by our above definition, neither is it real. The phenomenal world then is in that liminal state between sat and asat. It has an ‘apparent or practical reality’ though not true reality. The world, then, is maya.
Deutsch: “… the term “real” means that which is permanent, eternal, infinite, that which is trikalabadhyam, never subrated at any time by another experience and Brahman alone fits this meaning. The world then is not real, but it is not wholly unreal. The unreal or non-being, as we have seen, is that which never appears as an objective datum of experience because of its self-contradictoriness.”
What is maya? It is the illusory phenomenal world (illusory, but not unreal — this is a key point) that appears to us in the absence of full transcendence, in the absence of attaining experiential knowledge of Brahman. We are caged in maya because of avidya — a fundamental, pervading ignorance about the true nature of reality. Once we do gain true knowledge of Brahman, the question of the existence of the phenomenal world melts away. The person who has obtained Brahma-vidya will still be in this world, will still experience the sights and sounds and emotions of this phenomenal world; but she will disregard all this, it will all be like water off a duck’s back, for she has become one with the non-dual reality. For the rest of us, those of us who have not (yet?) had that experience of oneness with Brahman — we do still need to live in the world and by the mores of the world. The world may not be ultimately real, but it exists, and we need to live our lives in it.
Deutsch again: “… maya is beginningless (anadi), for time arises only within it; it is unthinkable (acintya), for all thought is subject to it; it is indescribable (anirvacaniya), for all language results from it. The level of Appearance is thus maya.
What might it be like throw off the blinds of avidya? The Advaitin describes this as a flash of intuitive insight, an experience of one-ness with Reality. As Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and It’s Enemies, “(According to Aristotle) Intuitive knowledge consists in grasping the indivisible form or essence or essential nature of a thing… it is the originative source of all science since it grasps the original basic premises of all demonstrations.” Knowledge is only possible where is there is separation between a subject (that knows) and an object (that is known about); there can thus be no ‘knowledge’ of the non-dual Reality, where subject-object distinctions have disappeared. One can only experience it in moments of ineffable transcendence, characterized by unsurpassable bliss. Brahman, then, is satchidananda — ultimate reality (sat), pure consciousness (chit), infinite bliss (ananda).
Why is there avidya in the first place? We do not know. We can never know, since we are asking these questions from inside the very world that is bounded by avidya (all thought, all modes of questioning are themselves subject to avidya), we are ourselves chained by avidya. Just like the border Kant drew around us, permanently separating us from the true nature of things-in-themselves. And if do we transcend avidya to experience satchidananda? Well, then the question ‘why’ itself disappears.
If the only reality is Brahman and the world is illusory, what about ethics and morality within this world? Is there any ground for ethics, or is everything game in this world of maya? While this is a much broader topic that can reasonably be taken up in this essay — and one that I will have to tackle after a lot more reading of the Advaitic literature — I think it’s quite fair to say that the uncompromising non-dualist stance of Shankara leaves little room for ethics or even theology. What is the difference between a murderer and the saint if they both transcend the world by achieving knowledge of Brahman? Do misdemeanors in this illusory world even matter? What if someone who has transcended this world commits a murder? The Advaitin might say that the one who has attained knowledge of the non-dual reality has given up all attachments, has shaken off both vice and virtue. Any selfish act, let alone murder, will not even be conceivable by such a person. Interesting line of thought, but fair to say that it might not satisfy someone looking for a solid ethical framework.
“The criticism is often raised against Indian philosophy in general, and Advaita Vedanta in particular,” Deutsche says, “that it turns its back on all theoretical and practical considerations of morality and, if not unethical, is at least ‘a-ethical’ in character. If by ‘ethics’ one means a rigorous, independent inquiry into problems of, and questions concerning, the meaning of value, the justification of judgments, and the analysis of moral concepts and concrete existential modes of behavior, then this criticism is justified. It is true that Advaita Vedanta, whether in its ancient beginnings or in its more systematic philosophical form, does not raise, let alone answer, many of what Western philosophers consider to be the most basic ethical questions.” (emphasis mine)
“It must be clear to anyone who has mastered the framework of the true Vedanta-philosophy,” Max Muller writes in The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, “… that there is really but little room in it for psychology or cosmology, nay even for ethics. The soul and the world both belong to the realm of things which are not real, and have little if anything to do with the true Vedanta in its highest and truest form… It rests chiefly on the tremendous synthesis of subject and object, of the I and the It. This constitutes the unique character of the [Advaita] Vedanta, unique as compared with every other philosophy of the world which has not been influenced by it, directly or indirectly.”
The theist might find Advaita to be just as unsatisfactory as the ethicist. Reality as nirguna Brahman of course does not provide any scope for a personal God. The Advaitic literature does present the concept of Isvara — the ‘the creative Lord who calls forth worlds, maintains them, and re-absorbs them as lila’. Isvara is then the saguna Brahman, Brahman-with-properties. But ultimately Isvara is illusory as well, since Isvara too is a concept that applies only within this world of maya. Since the avidya-chained human mind cannot conceive of the nirguna Brahman, we place Isvara as the stand-in for the Supreme. Isvara might be the pinnacle of what our limited minds can imagine, but for the enlightened one, for one who has achieved Brahmavidya, Isvara is as meaningless as the rest of the phenomenal world.
So, what is my take on Advaita, based on my explorations thus far? I have merely scratched the surface right now, but I find it to be an immensely fascinating, deeply sophisticated, and extremely intellectually satisfying school of philosophical thought. Does it answer the ultimate questions? Of course not, for these are unanswerable questions. But I do now think that Shankara and the other Advaitic thinkers have perhaps taken us as far as we can possibly go toward the limits of what we can know; they have pushed rational inquiry as much as they could, beyond which lies the leap of pure intuitive experiential insight. How thrilling it is to hop along with these thinkers as we travel into the unknown, on our endless quest to know the knower.
